The Passport essential 750GB is partitioned as two drives. I would like to change drive letter on the large partition but I can’t. I think it is because the drive is marked as “basic” rather than “removable”. It doesn’t seem to make sense that a USB drive would be unremovable. So how can I change this situation?
I need a fixed drive letter because I bought this drive to store work related files so I can work in 3 different places and I need the drive to be recognized as the same letter on the three computers and I need the drive letter to always be the same no matter how many USB drives and sticks are connected so I usually choose drive letter W:.
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Even though you assign a Drive Letter to the external drive (Any USB drives) connected to any Windows Machine, the OS will assign the drive letter to any USB drive.
You can make a static drive letter on One of your computer but when you plug in the external drive on the 2nd computer, then the drive letter differs.
I want to assign this drive the letter W: on all my computer. I understand that I will need to explicitly do that assignment on every computer I use. I used to do that procedure for other USB drives. For instance I have a USB stick drive that is mapped to K: on all my computer and it is remapped automatically everytime I connect it in.
But this does not work for the Passport drive. I don’t even have the option to change the letter for this drive in the disk management control pannel.
So in essence, my question is “What do I need to do to this drive so I get the option to change its drive letter in the disk management control pannel”.
Looking around on the web for an answer, I found two possible explanations:
1) Because the drive is partitioned as two drives It seems windows have difficulties understanding the status of the second partition.
- The password entry may prevent Windows from mounting the disk as a removable drive and it looks like non-removable drives cannot be reassigned a letter.
Apart from that, it seems that every disk that is labeled as “basic” cannot be reassigned a letter.
The disk as it is right now is not mneeting my use requirements. The 2 solutions I am currently contemplating are to:
- Return the drive and buy another one without all those issues.
or
- Repartition this drive as a single partition, reformat the drive, and use the open source TrueCrypt to encrypt the data I store on it.
I think I will try the second option first and it that doesn’t work, I will use the first option.
